


fresh wintergreen pastels

by feralphoenix



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-20
Updated: 2018-05-20
Packaged: 2019-05-09 10:40:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14714510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feralphoenix/pseuds/feralphoenix
Summary: Lyra learns something she didn't expect about her legendary Indigo Champion predecessor.





	fresh wintergreen pastels

**Author's Note:**

> _(smile because it happened_ – if the walls come down what business is it of yours)
> 
> this is just a little bit canon divergent. hey gamefreak please let leaf out of your fricking basement

After the battle, you split up your Revives; it’s too deep into Mt. Silver for it to be practical for any Trainer to mad dash your way out in search of the nearest Pokémon Center. You made sure to come prepared, and you guess she must have too.

Once both your teams have been healed up, she lets her Pikachu back out of its ball; it immediately climbs up her arm to perch on her shoulder. She doesn’t seem to register the weight, and from its obvious affection you guess that this is the Pokémon she tends to leave loose the most. You consider your options a little before bringing out your Umbreon. It would be nice to share this moment with your Typhlosion, but this whole area is filled with too many rock and water types for that to be practical.

Battling is easy—you mean, you’ve been through the whole League back home and here in Kanto too, battling is just sort of second nature no matter what sort of Trainer you’re up against. But now that the battle’s ended you keep remembering that this is _Leaf_ and thinking about how your shoes are scuffed up and your hat is dirty and your hair is probably a frizzy mess from cave humidity and you’ve got a new pimple on your chin, and she’s a couple years older than you and if you ever met the teen girl League Champion who made you want to try fighting at Gyms and getting to be a good battler you wanted to meet her as an equal instead of looking and feeling like a scrubby gawky tween.

While you consider a little bit whether you could make a hasty escape through the caves without her noticing, or somehow hit rewind on the past hour and return to the innermost sanctum of the mountain with a better plan at maintaining a cool and collected façade, Leaf straightens her hat and looks at you sort of sidelong from under the brim. It’s not so much that she doesn’t look you in the face as that she seems to avoid eye contact; she’s _definitely_ been looking at you and sizing you up the whole time, but her poker face makes her hard to read.

 _Are you related to Champion Kris?_ she suddenly signs at you.

This makes you blank out for a long few seconds—your sign is very rusty since you rarely used it since you graduated school, and embarrassingly it took you a while to recognize your mother’s sign name.

“Oh, uh, yes,” you say out loud, forgetting to sign along with your speech like a great big doofus. You squinch your eyes shut and take a deep breath and then start over, hands following along properly this time: “Yeah, she’s my mom.”

Leaf _smiles._ Your heart starts pounding even harder than it did when she challenged you, and you just about jump out of your shoes and tumble backwards down the stairs. _You look just like her, so I thought that maybe… I saw her on TV a lot when I was really little, when she was getting press for being the first girl Champion in the Indigo League._ She presses her hands together here for a long moment with her eyes closed and then goes on, _Your mom was my IDOL when I was a kid._

Your face hurts from smiling, and abruptly your eyes start to leak: You’ve been looking up to this girl for three and a half years now, since you started hearing on the radio that in Kanto it looked like there was going to be a new girl challenger for the League for the first time since your mom retired, proof that maybe you COULD follow in your mother’s footsteps after all, that she wasn’t just a fluke, that you could hope for better than settling down as a gym leader when you went out on your own journey. Those feelings only strengthened when you heard the news that she’d taken down Team Rocket near singlehandedly, and then when she _did_ successfully take the title. She battles at a level that even you had to struggle to keep up with. And she’s _fangirling._ She’s the first person outside your family to tell you that you and your mom look alike.

“I can’t wait to tell her all about this,” you say. “I think she’d be just as happy to meet you as I was.”


End file.
